Bob Christof and Amon Endt presented at Casual Connect Europe 2015 about GamePoint’s challenges and successes in bringing a chart-topping social casino web game to mobile. One key component was that they had to revamp the game. Bob further explained,”We kept it familiar and didn’t sacrifice any features. . . We did it all from scratch!”
As a kid, Bob Christof’s dream job was to be a game developer. Ever since he was 9 years old, games have fascinated him like almost no other medium (movies being the only competition). He found them immersive, intense, and emotional — with early games, especially, letting him exercise his imagination.
As game director of GamePoint, you could say he’s living the dream. He leads a group of 20 people to create “awesome games” which reach an average session time of over 130 minutes and have a customer lifetime of over 30 months for paying users. “It sounds like an shameless promotion,” he says, “but I’m really proud of these statistics.”
Bob got his start in the game industry as a writer and reviewer for Gamer.nl, the Netherlands’ biggest game-related online magazine — an awesome job for a poor college student.
Back then, there was no Facebook, no YouTube, no Twitter. Gamer.nl had to build and cultivate their own online community. While casual 
games didn’t exist at the time, let alone those with multiplayer and community features, Bob says the experience of helping build an online gaming community for Gamer.nl was crucial for preparing him for such a thing.
The Importance of Community
When GamePoint bought up Gamer.nl and Bob transitioned into new roles, that belief in the importance of community stuck with him. “I believe that being successful with the community has had a major influence on the success of GamePoint and it’s why today we still strongly believe and invest in community tools, both visible and invisible to players. If players become part of your community and you pull the right strings, you will have players stay for much longer on your platform.”
His first roles at GamePoint included community management, game-development and help desk, experience which helped him to readily identify the issues players had in-game. GamePoint also took an-unprecedented approach to community management by directly contacting players who reported bugs and other issues.
This approach helped to solidify GamePoint’s sense of community. “You solved major bugs that way, meaning other players won’t have it, and the player himself is really happy someone from the development team personally contacted him to solve the problem,” he says. “It helped, and still helps, development by just calling those players themselves. It’s a win-win situation we still do at this very moment.”
GamePoint now integrates multiplayer and community functions into all of its games, and it has an entire floor of community specialists who manage their online community, allowing Bob to focus “100 percent on making awesome games with the best community features.”
Early Challenges
While GamePoint had a good sense of community and their early games were successful in terms of their daily active users, they were not moneymakers. At the time the company was using an income model based on ads, but they weren’t generating enough revenue.
The company undertook the challenging task of drastically changing their business and gameplay model in such a way that players would accept paying for games they were once able to play for free.
Luckily, GamePoint succeeded in their efforts. “I learned a great lesson that day,” Bob says. “that you have to step out of your comfort zone once in a while and take risks … if you don’t try you’ll never find the golden egg.”
Another growing pain came in product testing. When GamePoint began letting users test their games they asked them to simply start and play a game while GamePoint used eye-tracking to help figure out how people usually accomplish game tasks. “The number of people that were completely lost was amazing,” Bob says. “We were wondering how we got so many players playing our games in the first place. We completely redesigned our games for new players so it’s much easier to understand how to start and play the game.”
Now GamePoint tests all the time. If there’s an idea, they’ll make a protoype, test it out, and see if the idea still works or needs to be refined. They alpha test every two weeks, while betas get tested several times a week depending on how many bugs there are and how quickly they can be fixed — and while they don’t do automated testing yet, it’s in the works.
Ultimate Satisfaction
This process of idea to testing to final product is one of Bob’s favorite things about his job. “Most of the ideas come up during the morning shower,” he says, “True story. At the end, when a project is launched, it’s almost unrecognisable because it went through so many stages. These stages are the most fun part of the job — you sit with all the major teams from GamePoint, trying to make everything perfect. The UX, the UI, monetization, everything should be harmonized as much as possible, which brings up the most interesting discussions.”
While Bob has had fun putting together many games in this manner, there is one which he regards with a personal point of pride: GamePoint Bingo..
In 2005, Bob decided to gamble on a multiplayer Bingo game which didn’t fit in GamePoint’s portfolio. To top things off, multiplayer Bingo games in general were practically non-existent. “There were no casual Bingo games and certainly not ones with community gameplay features built in,” he says.
He pitched the game but it wasn’t given the green light and the focus remained on other projects. However, strongly believing in the game and sure GamePoint’s players would enjoy it, Bob and others worked nights and evenings to bring it together. “When the game was done, we did a small test and the reactions were overwhelming,” Bob says. “It became, and still is, by far the biggest game on GamePoint.”
The Importance of Stories
While casual games are Bob’s forte, he is a strong believer in the growth of e-sports and streaming. “League of Legends, Defense of the Ancients 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive are great examples of how immensely many concurrent users they have and what a crazy amount of viewers they have on Twitch. And those players are playing these games not for months, but for years and are sinking countless hours and money into them. As with the GamePoint games, it’s all about the community.”
Community is paramount, but you can’t count out a good story either. Bob laments that the gaming industry still has trouble making games as emotional or immersive as some movies.
Although story-telling may not be as important for casual games, he believes that a good story pays off. “There are enough possibilities to tell a good story that will bring your users back to the game more often or re-engage with them if you update the app with new content instead of slapping level 350-399 in a new update.”
New Opportunities
For those looking to join the GamePoint team, Bob has good news — especially if you’re a 2D animator: They’re interested. “For some reason we’re having a lot of trouble finding people who can animate in Flash or Unity3D. Most people have experience with 3D modelling or simple Flash transitions. We’re mostly looking for people experienced with Tweenmax and particles. If someone is reading this and lives in The Netherlands or Kiev, please contact me.”
But you’d better bring your A-game. While Bob is definitely interested in those with experience, enthusiasm is absolutely crucial. 
He admits that there have been plenty of people who have wanted to work for GamePoint and know a lot about the industry but they have been turned away because the fire and drive wasn’t there. “I need people to call me in the middle of the night because they’ve got a brilliant idea or just fixed a problem we were fighting with for a long time — and not because they must, but because the project they are working on is handled like their baby,” he says. “Experience can be learned, but a burning fire in the eye, it’s priceless for me.”
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